thalidomide babies case- Ethics & Halacha

Dear Rabbi Halperin

I have a Halachik question that came up in a curious way and I hope that you can help me answer it. I am a professor of philosophy whose field is continental philosophy and I am at present editing a book on Sartre. One of the papers I received deals with an issue that took place in Belgium in the early 1960s, where a group of mothers made a pact together and killed their thalidomide babies who were severely deformed. Sartre makes some terse comments on this state of affairs and the author of the article tries to explicate what Sartre says by the use of certain ideas from Levinas. Although this act was shocking and a great tragedy, Sartre is in support of the mothers’

actions and my colleague uses Levinas to, in effect, back up Sartre’s point of view.

What strikes me about this point of view (the author of the article is a Gentile)– and this is why I am writing to you – is that Levinas himself, as an observant, Dati Jew, would have been horrified at the idea that there would ever be any justification for one killing one’s own child. Hence, my questions to you are:

(a) am I correct in the assumption I make above?

(b) from the point of view of Halachah: suppose that in fact one was the parent of a severely deformed and moribund child ( by virtue of the mother’s prior use of a drug like thalidomide). If the child was in fact being taken care of by a physician A, who was doing everything in his power to sustain the life of the child, would one as the parent even be allowed to transfer the care to another physician, B, who would allow the child to die more speedily because of natural causes?

(c) are there any sources or articles you can give me that deal explicitly with the issue of how one as a parent is supposed to deal ethically and medically with the case in which one has a severely deformed child who is suffering and in a state of constant pain?

This is a very serious and unpleasant topic (it makes me aware, Baruch HaShem, of how lucky my wife and I are to have normal children) but I do need an authoritative answer on the issue to be able to deal with the article in an appropriate way.

Thanks for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Professor Adrian Mirvish

Department of Philosophy

CSUC

CA 95929 – 0730

USA.